The production of cultural heritage is one of the strategic goals of Ca’ Foscari University. The voices of the poets who read their own poems are a cultural heritage that deserves to be produced and preserved. The relevance of issues such as voice and listening in academic research has been demonstrated by the interest that scholars such as Jean-Luc Nancy, Giorgio Agamben, Adriana Cavarero and Mladen Dolar, among others, have recently devoted to these subjects. All these authors have interpreted both voice and listening throughout new perspectives, linking them to important problems such as subjectivity and artistic creation in relation to ethics and politics.

A poet who reads aloud a text of his/her own causes multiple relationships, which concern the process of creating that specific text, as well as the very process of poetic creation. A poem read out loud, always reveals its innate musical quality as well as a physical voice reading aloud a certain poetic composition always re-projects and restructures constituting aspects of its distinctive poetic structure – as the enjambment and caesura. In the action of reading aloud, interpreting or performing a poem all this information about resonance, melody and rhythm shows up and disappears at the same time – if not preserved by multimedia technologies.

All this information inhabits the vocal expression that often shows the fractures between syntax and prosody, grammar and performance, making evident the variations within the published and the vocal version. This leads to a new relationship between the subject who is reading, listening and understanding it, and new questions about interpretation and authorship. From studies on sound materials made by the poets themselves, reading aloud is not a simple practice or a less reliable source than the page. It integrates the process of creation and preservation of poetic text challenging the written text as a reliable source of conservation of creativity and creativity itself.

For this reason, Phonodia® was created as part of Prof. Elide Pittarello’s project “Archivio delle voci di poeti (A viva voce)” at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, in collaboration with Prof. Renzo Orsini at the Department of Environmental Sciences, Informatics and Statistics. Phonodia® is a multimedia on-line archive dedicated to poetry and voice that focuses in particular on voice in relation to contemporary poetic language. It collects and present recordings of poets’ voice reading their own composition also offering visibility to materials of academic production in order to promote scholarly engagement with critical interpretation of recorded poetry aiming to became an on-line archive for poetry and voice as well as a tool for literary research in this field.